Remuneration
by The Hatter Theory
Summary: To spit in the face of fate was nothing because she was everything he was, would ever be, and they were everything.


**Remuneration**

**By: The Hatter Theory**

**Disclaimer:** I don't own the rights to Inu Yasha

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How awful is goodness and how sweet the knife that cuts, the purity that seeps into his skin and burns him. Everything they are and everything they could be is burning up in the conflagration, the inching, clawing greedy flames that bellow from their lungs as words of love, whispered and smoky. Syllables sobbed and laced around one another until there is no beginning and end, a pyre to end them both. There has never been a more beautiful cage, a more confining rampancy.

She is suffering and rapture, the antithesis and antidote. Soft skin is a shroud that pulls him down, down, down until he is tangled and knotted up in her, lost and indifferent to a world that could exist outside of the never ending blue of her eyes. Could, but does not, might not, never was.

The greatest expression of love, the one gift they would give each other would end them both and it is enough to know that they are burning, dying, soaring and turning to ash in one another's arms, souls twining even as their very natures try to send them flying apart.

Defiant to the last, strong and angry, desperate to hold fast even though the sun is fragmenting into thousands of stars raining into his eyes, burning them, blinding him, he weaves the spell, speaks the words that bind them together, voice a roar above the crash of souls colliding and shattering, splintering into the ether. Her piercing scream is the scream of a woman possessed, a woman determined and he knows that even as their world is ending and they are breaking on the rocks of nature and blood and predestination that he made the right choice in loving her, the right choice in taking her, in pursuing this moment.

Her love, her choice, her words, her unyielding pride and illimitable capacity for suffering are the gifts tested and tried and taken into the balance.

They knew it was a risk, they knew that life, if there was after, would be irrevocably changed. But they had not prepared for after. Both had agreed, had known without doubt and accepted without reserve that there was more beauty in binding and burning into cinders than there was in forever wondering, questioning, separate and divided.

In the moments that stretch, tick, tick, tick into a lifetime of agony he feels her, as a mate should feel their lover, their match, feels her spiraling and ripping into him, igniting his flesh and scorching bone, leaving behind a flashpoint whisper where their energies mix and it is enough, because that is the feeling he has always craved to know, to understand.

And he knows she finds peace in that union, unholy and forbidden, understandably, irrevocably, irreversibly accomplished, that she finds that feeling, has sated the yearning and is burning up beneath, around, within his own smothering, scalding nature, and that they are one.

For a brief, glorious moment that carries into eternity, they are mated, their energies mixed and whorled and fused until there is no distinction, opposites that have blurred into ill defined murky shades of gray. Complete. They are unbroken, and peace is found in the climax, the spiraling, crashing, shattering of that moment where they are one soul, one breath. Triumph.

And in the infinity of that split second, they accept what is to come.

Nature takes it's course, and he can find no regret, no fear. Souls have touched, been bound and reveled in one another, and nature can have it's way, for it could never take back, never undo what had been done. Fate's hand could rip them asunder but knowledge would remain, following them through lifetime after lifetime, the process repeated again and again.

Suicide, martyrdom, death, none of it mattered. To touch love's threshhold and demand union, to self immolate within their own natures, finding harmony in the crisis, was to spit in the face of fate and it was nothing because she was everything he was, would ever be, and they were _everything_.

The starburst blindness of what they were, the roar and crash and resounding storm of their triumph flared and burst into nothing more than a lingering whisper of diamond dust. A cycle began anew, two bodies dying as souls united and split apart, reaching out and fighting the push of inimical energies.

One moment is all they would ever have.

One moment will never be enough.

One moment is worth it all.

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**AN:** A lot of people write about mating marks (including me) and how they affect Kagome and Sesshoumaru. But a miko and youkai have, essentially, opposite energies, and while balance is required, sometimes it's not possible. Just a random thought, because today has been screwy. Anyway, I don't see this as angst or tragedy. I don't. And I hope you guys don't either.


End file.
